Relocated

There was nothing but this brown dust as far as the eye could see. Its dry, clay-like texture choked my senses.

I would have sighed, but that would have meant sucking in a mouthful of whatever this crud was. And the air—don’t get me started on the air… all I could smell was excrement… everywhere.

And I had thought my time negotiating with the Borians had desensitized me to stench… I was wrong.

As my ship had hurtled towards this world, I eyed the environmental scans. There were plenty of nice places by the ocean and parts with lush fields… why, oh why, did I have to come down in this disgusting place? The ship’s scanners told me there were at least ten varieties of poisonous insects or reptiles in a mile radius at any given time. Why would anyone settle here, I wondered to myself.

The ship’s scanners had also shown a large populace, many sick… it was little wonder why, a short distance up ahead. From the scans I knew that luckily, even though my species is aquatic in origin, I could pass for one of the locals… well, mostly. I would need to acquire some clothing to blend in until I could repair my craft and leave this revolting place. My jumpsuit wouldn’t cut it, sadly.

I leaned my head back against the hatch frame; the cold metal felt good against my throbbing skull. You just couldn’t brace yourself well enough in a crash, and my head had taken a few unpleasant hits in some tender spots. Groaning, I ran a hand through my hair and found no trace of blood or severe damage. Once the medical bay came back online, I would get myself checked and make sure my injuries were as superficial as they seemed.

Closing my eyes, I felt the guilt weigh heavy on me… Veron and the rest of my siblings were counting on me to pull this off! I needed 10,000 colonists for each of the 40 brand-new terraformed worlds that we had created… if I pushed it, I could get away with 7,000 per planet, but that was PUSHING it. If we didn’t have the population, we could bid the backing for our project goodbye. We might eventually gather the resources to get the project running again, but we wouldn’t get this kind of interstellar alignment for another 5,000 years! This little crash could set us back in a big way, and I only had myself to blame.

I remembered Veron slapping me on the shoulder, so confident that I could get it done. It’s why, of all of the siblings, I was chosen to negotiate the relocation… because everyone knew that Brother Lithon Escraie could talk the scales off a razorbeast hide.

And I could—but I actually needed to be able to TALK to the razorbeast to do it. Now I was stuck on this dust bowl instead of following up with the Javonians, Craytons, and Borians for population relocation negotiations.

And if I had just dumped the funds for the Craytons, I would have what we needed. I was kicking myself for hesitating. At the time, I had felt like there was a better way than dealing with the Craytons, who were arguably unpleasant. They reproduced the fastest of all of the species we knew… well, save for the household pest Scava. Which meant their demands were completely outrageous; they had the numbers, and they knew it! They cared little for their offspring and would hatch new litters just to drop them on a planet to hold territory. Whether the babies lived or not was of little concern to them.

I glowered at my over-moralizing. The truth was that I didn’t want to deal with the Craytons at ALL. The Javonians didn’t have the numbers that we needed, and the Borians were both smelly and rude… and they didn’t quite have the numbers either. I had been being PICKY.

“And now you’ve let everyone down. Way to go, Lithon,” I muttered to myself.

I shook my head and turned back to the wrecked hull.

My ship had a matter converter, so all I had to do was make the parts and allow the ship to repair itself with the help of the maintenance bots. This wouldn’t be hard. It was one of the perks of Sequia Prime having focused primarily on jumping our tech forward. We had so many advancements that were light-years ahead of our intergalactic neighbors.

It was a large part of the reason we stopped world claiming; it was a confederacy-wide decision to focus on technological advancement.

Now we had all kinds of nifty things like magnetic gravity, matter converters—you name it.

And if we could get the backing, this project would allow us to utilize interdimensional travel, and it would also allow us to leap large expanses of space in a few seconds.

The advancements that we could make through this project were incalculable. But without the support of the interstellar community, we just couldn’t get enough resources.

My thoughts heavy and turning in circles on themselves, I woke the working bots and we went to gather as much raw material as we could… the dirt.

I ran it through the filtering system so as to keep the ship mostly unaffected by this environment and to sort out anything living (going through the matter converter was a nasty way to die for anything), and let the program and the bots do their thing.

The ship came whirring back to life, everything blinking on and the ship informing me that it would take a few hours to get itself sorted. After getting the medical unit to scan me over and give me my clean bill of health, I had a bit of time. So I decided to explore a bit. I mean, I was here anyway—might as well look around, and it might keep my mind off things.

Time to check the currency of the realm, so to speak. Turns out it was gold, copper, silver… all things that I could make with ease. There were also bartering options… trade seemed to be a large part of the local species’ economy.

Hmmm… well, time to check out the locals.

I had to admit, I was curious about the local populace.

I took the back way into the closest settlement to attempt to find appropriate apparel. In a short time, I came across a home with clothing drying outside. It certainly gathered more dirt than it would have drying inside, but who was I to question their routines and customs?

In this case, it benefited me. I slipped into the yard and pulled a pair of trousers and a shirt from the line and slid it all on—dusty though it might be.

I heard a commotion inside and ducked down behind the fence… well, a very bent and torn fence… thinking that I had been spotted, but no—it was inside the house. It looked like there were two females, one almost mature and the other quite young, perhaps on the brink of puberty, and an adult male. I could smell the reek of alcohol all the way to my “hiding” spot. The females looked afraid, but more than that, they were heartbroken, and both had red marks on their arms and faces. The younger was crying and hiding behind the elder girl.

From where I hid, I heard the male barking orders at the eldest female… these were his blood kin—his daughters. I was shocked. This was truly a brutal race, if what I was hearing was correct.

“Lilly is trade. She ain’t got any other value. Saloon’s men will be here in an hour to pick her up. Get her things packed.”

“She’s 11 years old in a week! These are your debts, Paw. You can’t stay away from the tables. If you wanna sell someone to a brothel, then sell yourself. We’re your daughters! What would Mama have thought, huh?”

“Well, Lizbeth, you will be able to ask her if you get in the way.” His voice was cold.

He truly didn’t have any warm feelings for these two children. I was beyond shocked. I wondered how a parent could lose their connection with their offspring this way.

Of course, I shouldn’t be hypocritical; my world’s history was fraught with plenty of misery. Even so, it had been centuries since this kind of thing had been happening. I sighed. I needed to go. I shouldn’t get in the middle of this. But I couldn’t just walk away. I thought of the gold in my pocket. After mulling it over, I was about to approach the house and knock when a loud, sharp bang rang out. I looked up from my musings and saw the male drop over. The eldest female, Lizbeth, held a primitive projectile weapon in her hands that was currently smoking.

The younger female had gone quiet from shock.

This Lizbeth had guts—I would give her that—but her courage would not help her with either the men coming to collect their “payment” nor the law here… I suspected, anyway.

I went up to their door carefully and knocked.

The door was yanked open with force, and Lizbeth greeted me with the weapon pointed at me. “She won’t be comin’ with you today or any other!”

I held up my hands in a gesture of surrender. “I’m not from the saloon. I heard what happened, and I’m guessing you two are in trouble.”

She eyed me suspiciously. “What’s it to you, stranger?”

I eyed her levelly. “I can help you.”

“Not your business.”

“No, but I’m guessing that you aren’t equipped to fend off the debt collectors or your legal system. Nor do you have time to escape far enough so as not to get caught by either.”

Lizbeth closed her eyes and sagged to the doorframe. “No, but I won’t let Lilly get taken.”

“I can respect that, and I can empathize with your choices. So I have an offer for you and your sister. May I come in?”

She looked at me, weighed the decision.

“You can keep your weapon on me while I speak.”

She nodded then and waved me in. She motioned for me to sit at their broken-down little table and motioned for Lilly to bring me a drink. I waved them away.

“There is little time, so I will get straight to it. I have a job for you both and anyone else in town that is in a similar situation to you. Interested?”

They both looked at me skeptically, but didn’t dismiss me. So I began. “I am with a group that needs settlers for a new colony. We need people to tend to the land that aren’t troublesome, are responsible, quick learners, and willing to work hard. Does this interest you?”

Lizbeth’s eyes went wide with interest and then narrowed with suspicion.

So I laid out the terms. She was decisive, and with a short mental weighing of options, she agreed to my terms.

Ten times the land that they had here per person, a fair wage, pre-manufactured housing to start, and the ability to build their own custom homes once they were more settled—training, medical assistance, and help. (I didn’t mention the bots and androids that would be assisting them; it would be better for them to see for themselves, or else it would have been too far-fetched for them.) They would travel to the colony and settle there, more than likely not going home for the first five to ten years.

Once Lizbeth agreed to the terms, we packed them up and got them back to the ship, taking their burro seedling to help with the hauling. Turns out burros were quite handy.

Lizbeth and Lilly told quite the tale as they rode back to the ship. Many came out west to find land and lead new lives, only to die at the hands of bandits or plague or famine. So many things went wrong. If put to the people out here right, there would be plenty of population for the colonies. But I knew I needed someone familiar with the way that this species thought… their customs… their lives. Oh well—one step at a time.

The girls weren’t as overwhelmed as I had thought they would be. As fate would have it, their mother, before she passed away, had been an avid science fiction reader and had shared her favorite stories with the girls as they grew up. Lilly said it meant they were on the right path—everything was coming together. She said fate was funny like that. I had a feeling she was right.

Once Lilly fell asleep, I spoke with Lizbeth about the idea of her recruiting for the Sequian colonies. She would get an extra stipend and become quite wealthy in a short amount of time. Lizbeth said she would give it thought.

I knew her main concern, outside of the alienness of the offer, was securing her younger sister and her future. I would give her some time to adjust… not much, as the project had to be actualized quickly, but I would give her the time that I could.

The girls spent a few days investigating the ship and asking me endless questions about my people and the worlds they would go to. When they asked why the need for so many settlers, I explained the project to them and the need for backing from the intergalactic community.

The only way to get backing was to expand our standing in the intergalactic community and the only way to do that quickly was by world claiming.

So we claimed planets that nobody wanted and terraformed them, but we needed a population to hold them. Thats where the settlers came in. Once they had their heads wrapped around it, it put them at ease.

In the end, after seeing the future that awaited her and Lilly, Lizbeth agreed to head up recruiting operations on Earth. She knew the local customs and had a good sense of people.

I was able to boost the signal enough to relay that I had found enough people to populate all of their worlds, and the birthrate was much higher than the Sequians’. Not to Crayton levels—below Javonians—but fast enough to maintain and grow their colonies. These people were all settlers in much harsher conditions than the ones they would be facing and were serious, hardworking folks who took responsibility as a way of life.

Once the relocation ship arrived, they would begin extradition and medical care.

Within two months, the colonies had enough population to apply for the support of their project.

Lizbeth Kelly kept recruiting and filling the colonies.

Even though what I had done was, in the strictest sense, illegal… no one was going to miss these people. And they were being well compensated with a much better life.

But I still had to face consequences back on Sequia Prime.